


The Key and The Gate

by blue_crow



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Gen, Road Trips, lovecraft
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-11-08
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:18:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_crow/pseuds/blue_crow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Molly invites Sherlock and John to her wedding out in the country, Sherlock unexpectedly agrees. Of course, that's not out of kindness or decency- it's because he recognizes her fiancee from the supernatural tabloids, an astronomer who disappeared under mysterious circumstances a year ago. John isn't sure what to think, except that the man's eyes are too dark and too wide, and that the weather has been very odd indeed...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1

 

1

 

"John, phone the morgue," said Sherlock Holmes offhandedly, his eyes fixed on the peculiar artifact before him.  His obsessions were always more captivating than the trivial details of tracking down laboratory results or research documents, so of course, those fell to me.

He was too entranced to notice the tea tray that I deposited beside him, despite it being about the hour he usually realized he’d forgotten to eat breakfast. I used my mobile to dial, and had done so often in the past months that the number was amongst my ‘frequently contacted’ list.  The receptionist was cheerful until I asked for Molly Hooper, the technician that Sherlock preferred.  (That is, I assume that he preferred her- it may have been that no other scientist would work with him.)

"I'm sorry, sir, but Miss Hooper isn't in.  It's very unusual.  I phoned around to other hospitals, but she wasn't at any of them.  But then I started calling her family, and- I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but her sister says she's gotten engaged!"

"That's very sudden," I said, taken aback.  The last time I’d seen Molly, she’d been as conspicuously single as ever.  Sherlock's eyes finally left his object of study to meet mine.

"Oh, yes, it is.  She said that Molly's just smitten and that she's moving out to the country this weekend.  She's just put in notice, it's very sudden.  That girl doesn't do anything impulsive!  I mean, she spent a month asking me if she should get her hair cut, and then it was only two inches off the bottom.  I know you're detectives, is why I'm saying all this."

Analyzing strange behavior was more Sherlock's line, and I wish he'd been the one to hear the receptionist's concern.  Still, I knew Molly about as well as he did, and the receptionist was quite right- she was a timid girl, and this was unusual.  "Look, would you give me a ring if she shows up?  We're anxious for our test results."

"Oh!  Of course, Doctor Watson.  I'd be glad to.  I expect she will, her desk is rather full, and she wouldn't leave a project unfinished if she could help it.  If she does, then I think we'll really have to worry."

"Thank you," I said, and hung up.  Sherlock was still watching me with the intensity he'd previously trained on his spectacular find. "Molly's been out. Apparently she's-"

Sherlock interrupted me with a dismissive wave of his hand.  "Then my results aren't done yet. Don't tell me until they are."  He turned back to his study of the device, running his fingers over the surface with a reverence I would have reserved for post-coital petting.  He’d pinched it from the crime scene- it had been embedded in the body that he was so eager to hear the autopsy for.  

"Right. Forgot you're a robot," I muttered. I didn't manage to shake the feeling of unease all day and was distracted from my latest blog post.  The weather might have been a factor- it was unseasonably humid, like a thunderstorm was about to break, though just as bitterly cold as it had been all month.  A great clammy fist threatened to suffocate the flat. 

Sherlock had caught some of my anxiety, and spent the afternoon in fruitless testing of the artifact, examining the edges and their cutting properties on a side of pig's flesh he'd gotten from the butcher.  None of the tests seemed to satisfy him, though his aims were mysterious to me. He was so frustrated by the lack of autopsy reports that he consented to a light dinner (though not, as I had to convince him, of pork cutlets).

The next morning was as cold and foreboding as the previous day had been.  The receptionist rang while I was eating breakfast to confess in a conspiratorial whisper that Molly had come in and had shown her the engagement ring.  She insisted on telling me about how plain and uninteresting it was, “practically a stock model!” before I could get her off the line.  Sherlock set aside his increasingly elaborate experiments and we caught a cab to the hospital, finding Molly tidying up after the autopsy, peeling her rubber gloves off.

"Good morning, Mr. Holmes!" she chirruped, and held out her left hand, wrist folded down dramatically to show off her new ring.  Sherlock ignored the gesture, so I took it and politely leaned in to look at the ring. "Isn't it just the best?"

"It's lovely," I said, returning her smile.  

"It's a fake," Sherlock said, leaning over the corpse instead. When we'd found it, it had been a smooth husk of a human, the organs removed from the chest cavity from beneath without a single drop of blood. The alien device must have cauterized the wounds as it went, but Sherlock had been unable to replicate those results. Now, Molly had cracked open the ribcage, and the body looked considerably more damaged than before.

"Who’s the lucky guy?"

"Oh, you'd love him.  He's just gorgeous."  She produced her mobile phone, and showed us the picture she’d set as the phone’s background- one of the two of them together, her arm around the shoulder of a slight man in his early 30s, his short, dark hair receding into a widow's peak.

Sherlock, to my surprise, took the phone from her, zooming in to get a better look at the man's features before handing the phone to me. Her fiance's over-large eyes had a strange, faraway look in them.  Extreme introversion, highly-functional autism, perhaps?  I wondered if maybe she'd met him online, he looked like the type that spent most of his time alone.  

"Doctor James Moran," Sherlock identified. "Are you going to the Czech Republic for your honeymoon?"

"Oh! Of course, you knew about that. No, we're to be wed at his family's home in the country."

"John and I would be honored," Sherlock said, already assuming we were invited. 

"Oh, of course! I'd love to have you there, and he seems so eager to meet you."  She dropped her voice to a playful whisper.  "Sherlock, I think he's a fan of your work. He asks about you all the time."  

With a chance to examine her, I couldn't help but observe that the engagement was treating her well.  She'd done her hair in a neat braid over her shoulder, and she'd applied her blush more evenly than usual.  The tone she was taking with Sherlock was casually flirtatious, a stroke of boldness she never would have dared before.

"I imagine he would," said Sherlock, after a moment's deliberation, his eyes hardening at the edges as if to bring her into sharper focus.  "I've wanted to meet him, as well."

"Oh, he'll be so pleased."  She leaned in to kiss his cheek, and then to kiss mine.  She'd changed her perfume to something more exotic, and while I couldn't identify exactly what the new scent was, I knew Sherlock would recognize it.  It didn't suit her as well as the old one had, it belonged on a more dominating woman.  "I'll email, later, with directions.  I hope it's not too far out of the way."

"And the report?"  Sherlock asked, strangely dispassionate about something that had so consumed him all week. He barely glanced back at the mutilated body on the table. I was hit with a fresh wave of horror at the incredible precision that the murderer had used to remove the organs, called into sharp contrast even by Molly's skilled autopsy.

"I almost forgot.  Here's the notes.  I'm sorry I haven't had time to summarize them, but you know how your cases are."  She laughed, but I noticed the start of the same faraway look that had been in James's eyes in the photo, a look that had suggested introversion on him but made Molly look like she'd been hypnotized.  "You're the only one who can make heads or tails of them."

"Well.  Until this weekend, then."  Sherlock accepted the oversize envelope and turned on his heel to go.  

"Goodbye!" she called, as I waved politely and followed suit.

Sherlock waited until we were in the elevator to release his excitement in a short leap, his fists pumping triumphantly.  "Yes!  John, this is what we've been waiting for!"  His grin bordered on manic.

"No, sorry, where what leads?  Molly's fiance?  I've never heard of him," I admitted, frowning a bit at the withering look Sherlock gave me for failing to follow.  

"Surely you remember at least something.  It was all over the tabloids!" He gave me the withering look to which I was accustomed.  "The Equinox was on about it for months.  The astrophysics student who went missing, about this time last year-- he came back months later with one of the phoniest cover stories I've ever heard.  Even the police thought so, and you know how dense they can be." 

Of course, I didn't read the trash supernatural tabloids cover to cover the way that Sherlock did, but I did remember something in the paper.  It would be better to be safe, though, and I asked Sherlock to recap it for me in the taxi back to 221 B, Baker Street.


	2. 2

2

 

James Moran, explained Sherlock, had been an astrophysics graduate student at Oxford, one with a reputation for practically living in the library during the week and the observatory during the weekends.  All of the interviews with his professors had indicated a very serious commitment to study, and an uncanny understanding of the laws of physics and vastness of space.  He'd never missed a lesson, until suddenly, one day, he vanished.

His disappearance coincided with a break-in at the records office, in which a file cabinet full of copies of student's sensitive identification was stolen. Many of the students whose information was compromised reported identity theft, which had made the incident look unrelated to his disappearance, but all of Moran’s records had been amongst the ones removed.  Further investigation, however, revealed that what information on James Moran remained was suspicious- no other school in the country listed him as a graduate, and the addresses that he had listed as his permanent residence and emergency contact did not exist.  It seemed as if James Moran had been an assumed name for a man who had vanished without a trace.

As suddenly as he'd disappeared, he returned, some six months later.  He claimed that he'd given notice to his professors of his intent to travel to the Czech Republic, and was shocked that none of them had received it.  He was able to furnish papers that proved he had been on the trip he claimed to have been on, cheesy photographs of himself in front of local landmarks, and his parents arrived from their remote English village to defend his identity.  Even his previous diplomas now seemed to check out, and the entire incident was written off as a strange series of clerical errors.  No crime could be pinned to Moran, so the police had no choice but to drop the case.

Of course, Sherlock's supernatural tabloids had glutted themselves on the issue.  They published alternate versions of the story every week while he was gone, mostly that Moran had gotten too close to sensitive alien data and that he’d been abducted to keep the truth safe.  Sometimes they claimed that he'd been trying to sell national secrets to the aliens, the communists, or the alien communists.  A particularly absurd version had been about a half-man, half-bat monster training Moran in bat-jitsu and encouraging him to fight crime as its sidekick.  None of them had satisfied Sherlock, but he had sensed something unsettling in the matter from the beginning.

Once Moran had returned, the tabloid stories became wilder for a few issues before petering out altogether.  There was no mystery in a real man who was visible and could be photographed, even if his very existence had been in flux.

Sherlock didn't have time to get into his theories by the time the cab had deposited us at the flat, and so, knowing my role in our partnership, I began to investigate travel options.  

"Townshend," said Sherlock from behind me, reading the address off of his phone.  "1930 Brattleboro Lane."

I tapped in the search string a letter at a time, and was a bit shocked when the map came up in a part of the countryside I hardly recognized. "The Reichenbach Observatory? This is in the middle of nowhere."

"Obviously," Sherlock said, eyes still on his mobile.

"It looks like his 'country home' is the site of one of the country's first telescopes.  He must be wealthy, even as shabby as this must be after 200 years.  I didn’t think they sold historical landmarks."

"Let me see," he said, and peered over me, ignoring the boundaries of my personal space.  "Yes," he purred.  "Oh, very good.  That would suit Moran.  So very dramatic." He paused for a dramatic effect of his own.

"You think he's playing Frankenstein on the roof?" I joked, to be rewarded with another scornful glare.  

"Come now, John.  Reanimating dead flesh was Ward's game.  Moran is up to something new, something… interesting. Nothing you'll follow, of course."  He finished reading the Wikipedia blurb on the observatory and got up to pace along his bookcase of tabloid archives.

"I was just- oh, nevermind," I said.  "It doesn't look like there's a train that goes all the way, but it shouldn't be more than a day's drive if we start early."  

"Don't bother me with trivialities, John, that’s why I have you."

"Fine," I answered, cheerfully enough for being dismissed like that.  Then again, if I were so easily offended by Sherlock's manners, I wouldn't still live with him.  I started in on the tedious task of researching lodgings and car rental services while Sherlock flipped through three dozen tabloids at once, ravenous for any piece of information that looked more interesting in this new light. He muttered comments to himself, manic, his fingers darting through pages so quickly it kicked up a breeze in the flat.

"Listen to this.  'Two nights ago I went walking in the part of the woods where I've seen the footsteps, the ones folk say are animals but I know better.  Trails led from the edge of the woods into a cave, a dark one, with obscene pictures carved on the side of the cliff of things I'd rather not think on.  I stopped before I got close, and there were some men I knew from town, tall in dark robes, barefoot.  They chanted an alien language, and something walked towards the cave mouth.  I didn't see it, but I sure smelled it- damp and bloody and foul, like when a goat births a stillborn, but worse than can be imagined.  One of the men's torches cast a shadow of the thing on the cave wall, and it weren't a man- I saw something wriggling at the edge.  I didn't dare run, for they might have heard me.  I heard them praise 'Shub-Niggurath'.'"

I shrugged, finding myself more concerned with the general lack of available lodgings in Townshend.  "That sounds like that fertility cult you keep finding inland.  Last time Lestrade brought you a report of them, you picked the cultists out of a lineup in five minutes and burned a bookcase out of boredom."

"Yes, that's true, but it was written by Evan Price, who lived in Townshend."  Sherlock was up again, prowling for another copy of the Equinox, and snatched it from the wall like it would run if he didn't claim it quickly.  "Evan Price, before you ask, stopped writing… ah, yes, sometime between Moran's disappearance and his return.  I called the publisher at the time, wanting to know why- Price's accounts were always so poorly written, they had to be written out of real conviction- and he'd told me that he no longer believed that Price had witnessed what he was writing about."

I had trouble believing that a tabloid would reject someone for not knowing what they were writing about when it featured stories about a woman training the Loch Ness Monster to do backflips through a hoop, but I said nothing.  We had found strange truth in some of the stories, though I had come to understand thatI had value to Sherlock as a skeptic.

"I dismissed the rest of his writings, then.  I concluded that the paper had gotten bored of Shub-Niggurath cults, or Price had finally written all he knew about them, and that he really had tried to invent some other beings, unsuccessfully.  His tone had quite changed."  Frowning, he pulled an even larger pile of magazines from his shelf and carried them to the sofa.

After that, he settled into silence, pouring over the articles more slowly. I continued to turn up dry results for over an hour, finding nothing. Every reasonable lodging was at least two or three hours from the Observatory, a fact I found somewhat unsettling. As far as I knew, every decent town in the countryside was peppered with small hotels, bed and breakfasts, and even the occasional rented country mansion; Townshend had nothing of the sort. 

"Well, I'm going to take some dry cleaning and stop at the Chinese on the way back," I declared.  "Maybe a reasonable bed and breakfast will materialize while I'm out.  Any requests?"

"Hot and sour soup.  And bring the black suit, not that navy sports-coat.  That jacket makes you look like you're off to boarding school."

"I like that jacket," I muttered, but I listened to Sherlock.  He'd always known about these things, when 'presentable' had been enough for me.  I did a cursory pass through his laundry to add to the pile, and hauled it out of the flat.

An hour later, I returned with the takeaway.  The suits would be done by the next day, and we didn't need to leave until Saturday morning, which I suspected was why Sherlock had consented to soup.  By then, he had amassed a large pile of open tabloids surrounding my laptop, one draped over the keyboard.  I'd gotten beyond arguing with him.  

"I heard the name of a god that the men had never worshipped before," Sherlock read, as I rummaged for clean bowls in the cabinet.  "First it was a whisper in the village, and then I saw a strange material brought in, a sulfurous sand in a truck under a tarp.  I stayed far away, but the sky went purple-black in the night, the craters of the full moon moved on its surface like blinking eyes.  It was a sun in the night and I had trouble looking at it for how unnatural it was.  I heard wings on the air, clumsy and heavy.  I am going to leave this place to the demons that have overtaken it."

"That's Price again?" I asked, setting the soup on the table beside him, careful to avoid his precious tabloid collection.

"His last article.  Two weeks after Moran's disappearance.  Accounting for publishing time, I think it's safe to say that the two incidents are connected."

I sat down at Sherlock's laptop to resume my search for lodgings, perching my bowl on the armrest of the couch.  "That sounds reasonable to me.  I'm not surprised he got fed up, living in one of those towns.  I would have signed up with the army even faster, if I'd been out there."  We'd found several cults like the one Price had described, of varying size and power.  The worst had been in a port town in America where the people had worshipped a monstrous fish god, and they’d inbred until they resembled their own stone idols.  Their faces had found their way into my nightmares; they had become the soldiers that I faced.  

"He did move," Sherlock said smugly, a certain pride in the revelation.  "We'll see him.  He lives on the way."

"Think you should call ahead and make an appointment?" I suggested, tapping in the same search string on Sherlock's laptop to resume my search for lodgings, only to stare blankly at the screen.

"No, I don't want to give him time to prepare a statement."

"I swear, this result was not up this morning."  A perfect page had materialized, a website ranking small hotels, bed and breakfasts, and other various rented rooms in rural areas.  It listed a small home in Townshend with a carriage house, two bedrooms and a bathroom shared between, breakfast and tea included, supper for an additional fee.

"Nonsense, John, you weren't looking in the right place," Sherlock dismissed.

I scowled, but he might have been right.  I don't remember exactly what I searched for, and it hardly mattered in the long run.  To sate my own curiosity, I checked the website's publishing date, but the page seemed to have been posted months ago, and had several positive reviews dating back over a year.

I called to make a reservation, and the woman's voice that picked up struck me as strange, though I couldn't place why.  Everything seemed normal enough- the accent, the syntax- but there was a buzzing on the line that haunted me as I tried to fall asleep.


	3. Chapter 3

3

 

The next morning, the weather was back to normal.  The weight of the air had gone almost entirely, and when I mentioned it, Sherlock checked his phone and reported that there had been a powerful thunderstorm in the countryside.  I saw its evidence on the road once we’d left the city, disturbed garbage cans in the suburbs and broken tree branches as we got further out.  Even so, the views were pleasant enough at first, manicured suburbs giving way to smaller houses on seedier lots, larger patches of desolation between them.

We'd been driving for several hours, Sherlock navigating, when he told me to pull over.  He'd spent the drive reading on his cellphone, his seat reclined as far as it would go and his feet on the dashboard, but he had finally returned to a more commonplace sitting position.

The area was run-down and spare, many of the houses gone to seed or boarded up.  I parked on the side of the main route and locked the car, so as not to alert Price to our presence by driving up to the front.  I had a suspicion that Price was likely to be armed- I thought his choice of accommodations indicated paranoia- but when I voiced it to Sherlock, he ignored me.  I checked the pistol in my side holster, just in case.

Sherlock led down the sidewalk, and stopped in front of the shabbiest house on the street.  It had a tall wooden fence in front with a broken gate, a boarded-up bay window in the front, and I counted at least three locks on the door, the newest the largest of them all.  We almost turned away, but then Sherlock noticed a slight motion in the curtains- a pair of eyes had been on us.  He jogged up the path, and knocked boldly on the front door.

A panel of the door slid back from behind an iron grate, and a man, presumably Price, examined us.  His eyes were deep-set and took a long moment to adjust to the light, but after he had satisfied himself that we were not who he was afraid of, he replaced the panel and set about undoing the locks.  Then the door swung open, as if by its own will, and the man stepped aside to allow us entry.

"Price," said Sherlock, as the man replaced the chain and secured all of his locks, "I came looking for some of your expertise."

"I know," said Price, walking down the hallway and into the kitchen, which was the room that the light had been in.  In the light, he wasn't as old as his sunken eyes had suggested- his unkempt hair was only gray at the temples, and his deeply set wrinkles were result of stress, not age.

He jerked his head to the table, and Sherlock sat where he had the best view of the room.  I took the chair beside him, closer to the door.

"You're headed North," he said, as he got down two mugs and threw in handfuls of looseleaf tea.

"And how did you deduce that?" Sherlock asked, his eyes never leaving Price.

"No other reason for strangers to come here," he answered, pouring water from the kettle over the leaves, and watching the steam clear.  "Especially… knowing strangers."  The older man met Sherlock's eyes, and the look between them was charged with the kind of knowledge that Sherlock collected, knowledge of the paths that led to madness.

"A friend of ours is to be married to James Moran," he explained, and I'd seen the tactic before, that Sherlock was giving him enough to hook onto, enough to whet his interest and his concern.

" _James_ Moran?" he murmured, picking up the mugs and carrying them to the table, setting one before each of us, just out of easy range to take.  It was just as well, I didn't favor the smell coming from the mugs.  It was strong and somehow medicinal, like the vapors that arose from gin.  "I didn't know there was a James.  Even so… a Moran.  She'll be like the rest."

"Not if we can figure out what's happening," Sherlock said, trying to catch Price's eyes, though Price remained evasive and looked more at the mugs than at his two guests.

"You'd best forget your friend.  She may already be… corrupted.  Or… worse, now."

"Tell me more."  Sherlock's eyes were hungry.  

"When I… lived there," Price explained slowly, reluctant, "It was the Black Goat we feared.  And the worshippers.  They took the girls, sometimes, or… the girls just went, on their own will.  They came back changed, raw, brazen, if they came back at all.  All the Moran women came back like that.  Most others didn't."

"What were the cultists like?"

"The Morans, the Lockleys, the Abbots… family clans.  Old families, way back, peasant families.  None of 'em Christians.  Pale, big eyes, tainted.  Big men, big shoulders, powerful.  Some of the sons left to the city to bring women back, but if a woman from Brattleborough ever left, she never came back, whether from fear or that she'd been… taken."

"Do you know how they lure in the women?" Sherlock asked, catching something in his tone that I had only gotten a hint of.

"Dark magic," Price spat, finally meeting Sherlock's eyes, and then mine.  "And you won't break it.  Not you."

"You tried," came Sherlock's voice from beside me, and this was what my friend had been hoping to hear.

"Yes, and I failed.  A year ago today.  My sister.  Leave well enough alone."  His eyes shrank to slits, and he looked ready to throw them out.

"Tell me about her," pressed Sherlock, undeterred.

"My sister was plain, bright.  Not what they go for.  Went for.  Girls they brought back were whores, smelled ripe, you know.  Christine, she taught school in town.  We thought she was safe.  We kept to the farm and the Church.  Then she says, it's the Moran boy, he loves her, they're to marry in the woods.  I took her to the Church, to the doctor, tried to take her to the city.  Nothing."

I reached forward to try to touch his hand in sympathy, but he pulled away sharply.

"Moran took her that night.  I didn't dare follow.  They had men outside my house with guns, and I'm not a brave man.  The moon was all wrong, it was gold, and the craters were… eyes, mouths, it shifted, drove me well to- to thoughts that aren't right, aren't for men to think.  It wasn't worse than seeing Christine next day in town.  She was empty inside.  A shell.  She didn't speak to me, didn't meet my eyes.  But I saw."

"Is she still there?" I asked, though Sherlock shot me a dark look.

"Don't know.  I left.  But someone said something about… payment, and she weren't like the Moran girls who returned.  She were like the ones that never came back.  After that, it was… all different.  I bet you read… the buzzing.  It wasn't wings, like I wrote, that was… easier to write, to believe.  But it was just… something buzzed, hummed, in the air, electric like.  That was it.  It sounds… I'm such a coward.  But it terrified me.  Before, there were beasts I knew."

I looked from Price to Sherlock, and he was hiding his disgust.  I knew he didn't suffer cowards, and worse, men who let their fear come between them and their curiosity, their desire to uncover the truth.

"Thank you, for your time, Mr. Price.  We hope to find you some answers," I assured him.

"Thank you," he said, "But I'd rather you heeded me.  Don't go there.  Don't risk it."  His attention settled on the leaves floating on the surface of the mugs, and he examined them carefully, first the one before Sherlock.

"I think we'll take our leave, now," Sherlock said, standing gingerly.

"Watch him!" snarled Price, his eyes meeting mine with a fire they'd lacked before. His voice shook as he begged, "Deliver him from temptation."

"Let's go, John," Sherlock insisted, and tugged at my sleeve.  

I stood, as if I'd almost forgotten how, and followed him down the hall.  I watched as he undid the locks, while Price refused to budge from the table.  It seemed strange to me that he'd been so cautious about the defenses before, but now he simply watched us leave.  I thought I heard a choked sob from behind us.

**Author's Note:**

> Endless thanks to my intrepid beta Blaaksable and everyone else that has read this along the way.


End file.
